Can't help you with the SRA question sorry, but maybe Cyril7 will have the answer for you tomorrow.

Something else comes to mind from reading your posts:

- Once you are living in NZ, where will most of the websites you access be located?

- You are focussing on Sync. Speed so much that it worries me, because in most cases, this will not be the determining factor as to the quality of your internet connection.

- If you are expecting to be able to access streaming video from the UK once you are in NZ, be prepared for a big disappointment. It will most likely work (so long as you have an account with a provider who doesn't try and enforce IP range restrictions*), but the maximum speed you will get will be something like 500kbps at peak time (evenings or weekends) or maybe 1 or 2Mbps during off-peak hours (weekdays).

- The reason for this lack of bandwidth out of NZ is due to cost. There is currently only one fibre ring connecting NZ to the rest of the world, and it is owned by a monopoly. Consequently, most NZ ISPs purchase the minimum bandwidth they can get away with, whilst not getting too many complaints from their customers. Hence, the evening slow-down phenomenon mentioned above.

- Maybe you are aware of all this, but I thought it prudent to mention it because of the extreme importance you are placing on sync. speed. In practice, a few extra Mbps at your end will make no discernible difference because of the bottleneck formed by the international pipe out of NZ.

- If you are into Bit Torrenting, you will be able to get more out of your connection, but no matter what you do, I doubt that it will be possible for you to get much in excess of 10Mbps of International Bandwidth, aggregated over all concurrent processes that are running. This is a bit of a wild guess on my part, because I am not a torrent user, but from what I have seen, others were managing to max. out their connections to around 5 or 6Mbps of torrents some time back, so it seems reasonable to assume some increase has taken place in the meantime.

If you can provide some further clues as to the categories of your expected usage, and the geographic locations of the servers they would be coming from, one of us on this forum can probably give you some further guidelines as to what you could expect.

* Due to IP range restrictions, it is not possible to access BBC iPlayer content from NZ. Maybe you can get around this by using a VPN leased from a UK host, but I haven't tried.

johnr: Many exchanges around NZ have waiting lists for ADSL ports don't expect to hop off the plane move into your new house and get connected. You go onto a waiting list and when someone leaves the next house gets connected does not matter what ISP you are with

John

what do you define as many??

maybe I'm just very lucky, but the last three times I have moved house in the last 4 years I have had no wait to get connected.

Yes you are lucky have a look at the complaints over Geekzone when users have wanted ADSL and they have been put onto a waiting list

John

A bit of a self selecting sample I would say.

any chance?of a ballpark estimate?? are we talking 10% of exchanges?? 50% of exchanges?? 90% of exchanges?

No Idea that is why i used the word " MAY "

John

you said MANY, not MAY, (typo maybe?)

I just wondered what you meant by 'many'.? a small percentage or large percentage?the rest of your post:?"don't expect to ... move into your house and get connected [straight away]"?implies a majority of exchanges are full. (since if it was?<50% of exchanges were full, then you would expect to get connected straight away since the chances of getting an exchange with a space?> chances of getting a full exchnage)

I just wondered if that was true, and if so, what are odds of me moving house 3 times and each time not having to wait to get connected.

for eaxmple, if by 'many' you mean that, say, 90% of exchanges are full and I moved randomly to a new exchange three times, the odds of me getting an exchange with a space on it would be 10% x 10% x 10% = 0.1%.? So I was extremely lucky!

OTOH, if by 'many', you mean 50% of exchanges are full then the odds of me getting 3 exchanges in a row with spaces are 50% x 50% x 50%?=? 12.5%.?? still pretty lucky, but not as lucky as if 90% of exchanges are full.

I have no idea what the figures are I am going by the feedback read on Geekzone some people have posted they may have to wait 12 months to get connected but I suspect this the worse case. Looking back I should not have used the word " many " maybe " some " exchanges having a waiting list.

grant_k: Can't help you with the SRA question sorry, but maybe Cyril7 will have the answer for you tomorrow.

Something else comes to mind from reading your posts:

- Once you are living in NZ, where will most of the websites you access be located?

- You are focussing on Sync. Speed so much that it worries me, because in most cases, this will not be the determining factor as to the quality of your internet connection.

- If you are expecting to be able to access streaming video from the UK once you are in NZ, be prepared for a big disappointment. It will most likely work (so long as you have an account with a provider who doesn't try and enforce IP range restrictions*), but the maximum speed you will get will be something like 500kbps at peak time (evenings or weekends) or maybe 1 or 2Mbps during off-peak hours (weekdays).

- The reason for this lack of bandwidth out of NZ is due to cost. There is currently only one fibre ring connecting NZ to the rest of the world, and it is owned by a monopoly. Consequently, most NZ ISPs purchase the minimum bandwidth they can get away with, whilst not getting too many complaints from their customers. Hence, the evening slow-down phenomenon mentioned above.

- Maybe you are aware of all this, but I thought it prudent to mention it because of the extreme importance you are placing on sync. speed. In practice, a few extra Mbps at your end will make no discernible difference because of the bottleneck formed by the international pipe out of NZ.

- If you are into Bit Torrenting, you will be able to get more out of your connection, but no matter what you do, I doubt that it will be possible for you to get much in excess of 10Mbps of International Bandwidth, aggregated over all concurrent processes that are running. This is a bit of a wild guess on my part, because I am not a torrent user, but from what I have seen, others were managing to max. out their connections to around 5 or 6Mbps of torrents some time back, so it seems reasonable to assume some increase has taken place in the meantime.

If you can provide some further clues as to the categories of your expected usage, and the geographic locations of the servers they would be coming from, one of us on this forum can probably give you some further guidelines as to what you could expect.

* Due to IP range restrictions, it is not possible to access BBC iPlayer content from NZ. Maybe you can get around this by using a VPN leased from a UK host, but I haven't tried.

Thanks for the indepth post

You're correct that I hadn't tought too deeply about the bandwidth out of NZ, too used to having many peers that run fibre to Europe and the US.

Don't torrent that much (a few US TV show that are weeks behind or not even screening here).

I had planed to move my 2 VPS from a .de host to one in london* to bounce off of for bbc/itv/tv5. If that doesn't work well I might have to resort to torrnets or usnet for my TV fix.

Back to one of my orignal questions are there any ISPs that have their own IRC or usenet servers (text) and a good comunity forum (not just pop drivel)?

* Will have to leave at least one in europe or the UK anyway as that is where all the traffic to the websites comes from, the mail server might get moved to a NZ host, will have to see. Will probably bee cheeper to leave it with the company I'm with than get server or two in NZ

NZ to Europe transit/routing is typically via the Southern Cross submarine cable(s) to the US West coast, then across the US to the east coast then to Europe from there.

For this reason you can expect latency of 250-300ms to UK servers, the latency probably has quite a negative effect of maximum throughput and there are plenty of points along the way for speed affected outside the control of the small ISP in NZ (all ISP's in NZ are small/tiny by world standards).

Most people choose to host things locally (typically expensive but fast) or in data centre's in the US West coast (cheaper, good central location between world and NZ).

As Ragnor says, expect very annoying delays and speed restrictions on any traffic to Europe, but there is not a lot you can do about that.

I suspect you are in for a bit of a shock when you get here, not so much on the local connectedness front, sure its behind the UK/Europe, but catching up fast, but the large blue thing between here and there with the even more inconsistent green/brown thing in the middle (US) will spoil your day.

Forget anything realtime from a UK based connection. Even a crappy 400kbit stream will not work properly to NZ.

If you are wanting to use the bbc stuff, you can use a vpn/whatever to get the download link onscreen, drop the VPN, download it, and then use the VPN to get media player to do all the license nonsense to start playing. Or use a socks/ssh client like bitvise and put that in your internet explorer and just point it to a machine you have ssh access to in the UK.

Despite the one I have access to being on some massive virgin fiber connection over there, data comes back here at a trickle with massive loss, and it seems to mainly be in the cross USA part that it happens.